The Minutes Between Meetings That Never Add Up

Looked at on a screen, the calendar seems reasonable. A meeting at nine, another at ten, a call at half past eleven, a site update at two. Between them, there is white space: fifteen minutes, twenty-five minutes, half an hour. Add it up and there are nearly two free hours in the day.

But nobody experiences those two hours. The first gap goes on finding the link for the next call. The second goes on answering the messages that arrived during the first meeting. The third is too short to start the proposal that has been waiting all week, so it goes on smaller things. At five o'clock the proposal is still waiting, and the free time has been spent without anyone quite noticing where.

This piece looks at those gaps: why fragmented free time behaves so differently from the same amount of time in one piece, and what the fragmentation takes from the people living inside it. It draws on published research and on vendor features, but the central argument remains a hypothesis to be tested in any particular workplace.

Why a gap is not the same as an hour

An essay by the programmer and investor Paul Graham, written in 2009, gave this problem a name that has stuck. He described a manager's schedule, organised in hourly slots where a meeting is simply one more appointment, and a maker's schedule, where people who write, design, analyse or build need long uninterrupted stretches. For someone on a maker's schedule, he argued, a single meeting can break a morning or afternoon into pieces too small for real work.

The essay is an argument, not a study, and its categories are broad. Most people in small and mid-sized businesses do some of both kinds of work in the same day. But it captures something many people recognise: time that is broken into fragments can be used for responding, but rarely for thinking.

What the transitions themselves cost

There is also evidence that the moments between meetings carry a cost of their own. Microsoft's Human Factors Lab ran a small study in 2021 with fourteen people wearing EEG caps. In one session, participants attended four half-hour video meetings back to back. In another, the same meetings were separated by ten-minute breaks, which participants spent meditating.

Microsoft reported that without breaks, beta-wave activity, which the researchers associate with stress, built up over the course of the sessions. The transition from one meeting to the next caused a spike in that activity, which the researchers attributed to people anticipating the next meeting while the current one was ending. With breaks, the build-up did not occur in the same way, and measures associated with engagement were more positive.

Fourteen participants is a very small sample, the meetings were virtual, and the breaks were used for meditation rather than work. The study cannot show what happens in any particular office. It does support a modest point: going straight from one meeting to the next is not a neutral act, and the space between meetings matters.

An illustrative calendar

Consider an illustrative case: the operations manager of a South African engineering services firm with about fifty staff. Their calendar is open to everyone in the business, and colleagues book time wherever they see a gap.

Client calls tend to fall in the morning, because clients prefer it.
Internal check-ins are booked by whoever needs them, in whatever slot is free.
Most meetings default to thirty or sixty minutes, because that is what the calendar offers.

The result is a day of six or seven meetings, with short gaps scattered between them. The manager's own work, which includes reviewing quotes, planning resources and writing reports, is pushed into the evening or into the next week. Nothing about this arrangement was decided. It emerged from the default settings of a calendar and the reasonable choices of many colleagues.

The human tax: time and attention

The time tax is the slightly paradoxical one. The minutes are not lost; they are spent. But they are spent on low-value tasks because that is all they can hold, while work that needs a longer stretch is pushed elsewhere, often outside working hours.

The attention tax is the strain of continual switching. Each gap begins with leaving one conversation and ends with preparing for the next. Mellorca has written about the cost of interruptions and context switching; a fragmented calendar builds those switches into the structure of the day.

Some people thrive on a full, varied calendar and prefer it to long stretches of solitary work. Others may find that a day of fragments leaves them feeling busy but unproductive. Mellorca cannot say which applies to any reader. The claim is that a calendar shaped by defaults, rather than by the kind of work a person needs to do, will tend to sacrifice the work that needs time.

What could realistically change

Shorten meetings by default. Microsoft's support documentation describes an Outlook setting that ends events a few minutes early or starts them a few minutes late, with separate durations for short and long meetings, to build in travel or buffer time. Other calendar tools offer similar options. It is a small change that gives every transition some room.
Cluster meetings. Grouping meetings into particular mornings or afternoons leaves other blocks intact. A team might agree that internal check-ins happen after three, or that one morning a week is kept clear.
Protect blocks for focused work. Booking time for one's own work in the calendar, and treating it as seriously as a meeting, makes it visible to colleagues.
Question the default length. Not every meeting needs thirty minutes. Some updates can be fifteen; some do not need a meeting at all.
Give gaps a purpose. Short gaps suit short tasks. Knowing in advance that the twenty minutes before a call is for replying to messages makes it useful rather than accidental.

Mellorca has also looked at the presence side of meetings in when screens sit between colleagues who sit together. Fragmented calendars and divided attention in meetings tend to reinforce each other: when there is no time to clear messages between meetings, people clear them during meetings.

What changes first, and the business outcome

The first change is that a person's day contains at least one stretch long enough for work that needs thought. Transitions between meetings get a few minutes of room.

For the business, work that needs concentration, such as quotes, plans and analysis, gets done during working hours rather than late or not at all. Meetings may also improve, because people arrive having had a moment to prepare. The broader point is made in the hidden cost of operational friction: small structural frictions repeated daily add up.

The human dividend

The dividends are time and attention. Time, because a deliberately shaped calendar turns scattered minutes into at least some usable hours. Attention, because fewer abrupt transitions mean less of the day is spent leaving one thing and bracing for the next.

What the person does with a recovered hour is their choice: deep work, learning, as explored in the employee who never has time to learn, or simply finishing on time.

The trade-offs

Less availability. Protected blocks mean colleagues and clients cannot always book the time they want. Some roles must remain highly available.
Clustering can create long, tiring stretches. A morning of back-to-back meetings may be harder than meetings spread across a day, unless the buffers are kept.
Shorter defaults can feel abrupt. Ending meetings early only works if everyone respects the new length.
Agreement is needed. One person protecting their calendar alone may simply push the fragmentation onto others.

Why it matters

The minutes between meetings are among the least examined parts of a working day. They look like free time, they are treated as free time, and yet they rarely function as free time.

Mellorca's interpretation is that a scattered calendar is usually the product of defaults, not decisions. Shaping it deliberately, with shorter meetings, clustered appointments and protected blocks, does not create more hours. It returns the ability to use the hours that already exist.

Sources and further reading

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/brain-research (last verified 10 October 2026)
Make all your events shorter automatically - Microsoft Support (last verified 10 October 2026)
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (last verified 10 October 2026)